The Helianx Proposition/page 46
Since the Helianx were such a long-lived race,
time passed in a very different way from how it was experienced by most other species.
The space gypsies had first encountered this profound disparity in many of the races
they had tried to warn of the impending universe reversal.
It seemed that for these races time was governed by the rotational rhythms of their
home planets, or amongst the more advanced species, by the measured vibration of atoms.
The Helianx considered this to be sequential time, and although they recognized attempts to standardize time as having value in plotting galactic navigation, they had never lost their innate ability to vividly experience a more subjective time.
Sequential time, as they all knew, was an inescapable aspect of the space/time continuum,
and due to localized gravitational forces was subject to a limited expansion and compression.
These anomalies were well understood by most intelligent space-faring species,
so regardless of the problems,
there emerged a common language to discuss the nature of time and reality.
Subjective time, for the Helianx, was something quite different. By controlling the quality of their meditational trances, they were able to manipulate their inner experience of the passage of time, speeding it up or slowing it down at will. This ability, present to a limited extent in most sentient creatures, had been brought to a fine art by the Helianx, and had allowed them to cover the vast intergalactic distances without being driven insane by the tedium of space. Of course, while the Helianx were in their trance, sequential time would be ticking away; planets were circling their stars in their predictably regular orbits, and caesium-133 atoms continued to oscillate in their atomic clocks. There was no avoiding the inevitability of sequential time, but at least the Helianx had learned how to avoid becoming enslaved by it.
So it was for Noe, alone on a strange new world. SHe was half-aware of the regular pulsing of night and day; of a single moon speeding across a star-studded sky; of the changing of the seasons and the occasional shaking of the earth on which sHe lay. Yet little disturbed hir dreams while hir enormous body made its own autonomous adjustments to its new environment.
When Noe finally felt sHe had recuperated sufficiently to make hir first moves in this strange new landscape, sHe realized that sHe had no idea of how long sHe had been resting motionless. SHe tentatively unfurled hir small wings, three rows of them arranged along hir full length, which glinted with a coppery glow in the evening sunlight. Then, as sHe shrugged off the debris that had accumulated over hir while she had lain there, sHe flapped hir wings with a little more vigor, sending an undulating wave of movement down hir long body. To hir astonishment, sHe started gradually to lift off from where sHe was lying, hovering with almost no effort about 50 feet above the ground. SHe recalled, without much pleasure, how much sHe had struggled to coordinate hir newly bestowed wings back at the simulacrum, let alone to get off the ground. Life here, Nos realized with a growing confidence, was going to be rather different.
